White: 'Soldiers' Faith' on Memorial Day

On Dec. 27, 1895, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., then in his 15th year as an associate justice on the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, encountered Edward Atkinson, a wealthy Boston entrepreneur who had become a pamphlet writer arguing for free trade and against “imperialism.”

Atkinson was born 14 years before Holmes, and the difference in their ages affected their roles in the Civil War.

Holmes and other seniors at Harvard College had enlisted in the Union army after the attack on Fort Sumter in the spring of 1861, whereas Atkinson, a more fervent opponent of slavery than Holmes, was too old for active duty, and spent the war years engaged in antislavery politics.

The choice of Holmes to deliver an address commemorating Memorial Day in 1895 was a logical one. He was not only a Civil War veteran, he liked giving extrajudicial addresses.

Holmes’ 1895 Memorial Day address had attracted enough attention to be reprinted in the December 1895 issue of the Harvard Graduates Magazine. Its appearance provoked critical commentary by Wendell Garrison, editor of The Nation, and E.L. Godkin, editor of the New York Evening Post.

Garrison ridiculed the speech as “sentimental jingoism,” and Godkin satirically described it as an argument for “force as a moral influence.”

Had the critics of Holmes’ “The Soldier’s Faith” address misunderstood its message? Holmes had a horrific war experience. He was wounded three times, one bullet lodging in his chest and other passing through his neck and out his throat. He had contracted dysentery, the consequences of which would affect him the rest of his life.

He noted in “The Soldier’s Faith” that he had stumbled over dead bodies, encountered corpses piled up on themselves, and experienced the dreadful tedium of waiting, concealed, while enemy shots came closer and closer. “When you are in it,” he remembered, “war is horrible and dull.”

But by 1895 Holmes’ recollections of his wartime experience had been replaced by a different memory. As Holmes walked down Washington Street in Boston, he saw a city dedicated to commerce, a nation in which war was “out of fashion,” a world in which young women aspired to marry men “of wealth” rather than soldiers.

Holmes took the atmosphere of the mid-1890s as a rejection of something he stood for. As he sought to articulate that something, it first appeared as a commitment to chivalric “gentlemanly” ideals, such as honor, self-sacrifice and civic duty. As a young soldier he had associated enlistment in the Union army with those ideals.

By 1895, it seemed, those ideals were being discarded in the pursuit of commerce, wealth, and personal security, and thus he sought to critique the “snug, over-safe corner of the world” that late-19-century Boston had become. But as Holmes proceeded through his address, another thought crowded in: Fighting, and war, was an elemental feature of being human.

“The Soldier’s Faith” will remain in the canon of memorable Memorial Day addresses because of the emotions that remembering the Civil War spawned in Holmes in May of 1895. One can find anger, guilt, alienation, relief, and even an element of romantic self-delusion in “The Soldier’s Faith.” One can also recognize remarkable writing.

G. Edward White is a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law.